Helloooooo!!! For the ask game, I have a request! Number 30: "You're okay. You've got to be okay. You've got to be. You're okay. Please. Please be okay." Featuring: Scott Smajor and Jimmy Solidarity. (I live for Flower Husbands angst. :3 )
The Walls Have Secrets Too
(I went for a more gen approach, but you can still read this as Flower Husbands!)
30 - "You're okay. You've got to be okay. You've got to be. Please. Please be okay."
ao3 link - ask game
Sausage was the kind of person to have a creepy basement with even creepier things lurking inside. Jimmy had been down there once before when he'd gone inside the wrong nether portal by accident, taken a good, twenty second long stare at the dimly lit, oppressive room, before leaving with a totally normal amount of haste, thank you very much Lizzie, no he was not being a wimp-
Things he had spotted in Sausages creepy basement included: cages, barrels of strange substances, propped up weapons smeared with incredibly suspicious red stains, cobwebs, more than a few things that were probably dedicated to that weird demon running around the server and a bunch load of other completely bizarre things. So, as any sane person would do, Jimmy had vowed to never go in there again.
A vow that, as he heard more than a few concerning noises drifting from below, he was fairly certain that he was about to break from the sheer curiosity alone.
His original goal had been to find Sausage, but seeing as he wasn't around, it wasn't like he could get upset at him for going in. And, well, he was just being nosy. It couldn't hurt to have a look at his neighbours freaky as fuck basement, right?
Jimmy grimaced as his hand almost slid off the oily rungs of the ladder, being sure to place his foot down with the extra care needed to make sure it didn't cause him to slap and fall to his death (because really, that would be inconvenient as fuck). The clinking of chains disturbed the horrifyingly empty silence, and he was hit by the awareness that maybe the basement was not the most fantastic place to explore because he was curious-
Something rustled. His blood couldn't really freeze, cod were special in that section of biology, but in that moment, every part of him felt like ice.
Oh yeah. This was an awful place to get curious about. Jimmy was leaving now, thank you very much! He'd heard just about enough of this spookfest. That was enough for today. Why was he even down here? He could have just asked Sausage what was in his basement. He would be, actually, next time he saw Sausage, because-
Just as he was about to make his way up, someone whispered something in a shaken, cracked voice.
…Well now he couldn't just leave. He was many things, and a coward was definitely one of them, but he couldn't leave after hearing that.
He swallowed and continued his descent. It was light enough that he could see, with the hesitantly sputtering lanterns and the cascading glare of the Nether portal, and yet darkness seemed to cling to every nook and cranny in shadowy, spidery fingers. The perfect place for something to be lurking and crawling and ready to snap. The perfect place for a corpse to be stuffed in a barrel, rotting away. The perfect place for the demon to be standing in the darkened corners, watching him with malice in their eyes.
There was another, tiny sound that could have been a whole host of unpleasant things, and Jimmy startled, almost falling off the ladder completely. He cursed instinctively and dragged a hand over his mouth, trying to muffle the words. It was unfortunately too late - he'd already spoken, and if anything sinister was crawling around, it had probably already heard him.
A hurried, burst of a choke emerged as he placed the last foot down, and he cricked his head around to where a wall jutted out, hiding whatever had cough from view.
His hand drifted towards his sword, fingers cramping around the handle. He couldn't decide whether or not to draw it. It was then, and only then then, with a ridiculous amount of courage and even more stupidity, that he was able to strangle out a question. "Hello?"
Silence.
Then-
"Jimmy?" The voice was hushed, cracked and frayed at the edges. All the things he would rather not be hearing from the world's freakiest basement. But… it seemed more scared than threatening, which raised a lot more questions than it answered.
"Yes…?" He bit back any of the nerves lingering in his system and slowly, slowly made his way to the wall. It shot out in such a way that it touched halfway across the already fairly wide room, leaving an empty, flat area in front of it. Any possible glance at the occupants was concealed by stones sealed with moisture and moss.
And blood, he realised as his gaze darted down to the floor. Every instinct in his body flared at once. "Who's there? What happened?"
"Aeor," a half hysterical voice hissed in pain, before shooting in a sharp breath and gasping feelby. "Jimmy. Jimmy help-"
The voice was cut off with a suddenness that made his stomach twist. Aeor? Then the voice sunk in, and he was hit by a sudden, dizzying wave of nausea. "Scott?"
Before he even fully grasped what Scott's voice was laced with, he was effectively sprinting to see what was behind the wall, expecting just about anything. A sacrificial altar, a summoning circle, some monster that replicated voices… his mind scrambled for practically anything to reason the sheer amount of blood on the floor.
The reality was a lot simpler than any of those things. Two cells lined up against the wall in mimicry of cages. The one pressed against the far side was… relatively untouched, cloaked in darkness, but the other was lit up with a casual intensity, perfectly displaying the absolutely horrific depiction of what he thought was supposed to be Gem, leant against the wall, drenched in crimson that spiraled loosely onto the floor.
Shit.
"Gem." Jimmy stuttered, immediately rushing forwards to the cell. There wasn't a door- which made it so, so much worse- "Are you okay? What-?"
"Jimmy." Her eyes were bloodshot and strained, like he was forcing them open. He'd seen her just under a week ago, all fresh and pristine and covered in glittering crystals, baring a staff powerful enough to kill anyone who even touched it. What the hell had happened? "Jimmy."
His pickaxe was out in a heartbeat, and without second thought he began to smash it against the bars, wincing as the metal screeched and wailed far louder than it should have. To say his heart was pounding was an understatement - it was flying. If he had thought that there was a boogeyman lying in wait behind a box earlier, then he definitely thought there was now.
Adrenaline crawled into his veins and sang. At any moment, something, someone could crawl inside and stop him. This was Sausages basement. Was… Sausage was slightly deranged, but he… wouldn't. Not to Gem. But he remembered the gleam in his eyes, the way that everything about him had shifted and…
The bars snapped - he'd put in more force than needed, and the bones in his hands felt so stiff they might break. Using the pickaxe to try and widen the crude gap he'd created was an act of desperation; every second longer he spent on breaking it, the more red seemed to pool out on the floor, and as soon as he was sure that he could actually fit through, he dropped his pickaxe on the floor and rushed inside. He couldn't afford to spend a moment longer gawking at Gem's crumpled form, he just knew that he had to get her out.
Sausage had teased him, quite some time ago, about the fact he chose to help move barrels of slime onto ships instead of letting the sailors do it. It was now, that he was holding Gem, with her great, heavy antlers and the enormous legs of a deer, that he was glad he did so much manual labour.
…the more he thought about Sausage, the more ill he felt. His arms shivered. He really, really didn't have the time to throw up right now, and he really did try to avoid looking at Gem's cracked, broken nails, or the bloodied fuzz that was peeling off her antlers, or the gaping hole in her leg that stared at him-
"Jimmy." Her hand snatched his wrist with surprising ease considering how… corpse like she looked. He was snapped out of the nausea the moment he looked into her surprisingly intense eyes. "You need to get Scott."
Oh.
Oh shit.
The realisation that hit him must have been visible, because one moment Gem was staring up at him, and the next she had snatched the bars for support and was hauling herself out of his grip (when had they even gotten out of the cell?).
"You- shouldn't be standing." Jimmy frowned, staring at the way her knees buckled and strained underneath the weight of pain and bloodstains. He didn't know how to fix those. Surely Sausage must keep medicinal things somewhere, right? He wouldn't want her dead- which made it a lot, lot worse-
"They put my things- healing potions, in the barrels." She grimaced, face whitening as she began to drag herself towards a pile of barrels on the other side of the room. He opened his mouth to argue, because she looked so pale and clammy that she could collapse at any second, but she shot him a Gem look. "I'm fine. Go get Scott."
Right. Scott. He'd heard him earlier, but the moment that Jimmy stepped towards the darkened cell that he must have been, every single part of him wanted to flee. Bit weird, considering that Scott was fairly passive and had never really tried to attack him, but the closer he walked, the more his nerves began to scream.
...something had cut Scott off, hadn't it?
If there was something else with Scott in that cell... no, no, no, he was not thinking about that idea-
He snatched the pickaxe off the floor and went back to breaking bars. These ones were definitely weaker, as if the very metal itself was rotting away, and it practically crumbled in front of him. Which… wasn't a bad thing, considering that Scott might literally be dying, but it was much louder than he thought it was. The noise couldn't have been a good thing. Not when he was literally underneath Sausage's house-
Jimmy could have sworn he heard something bump upstairs and he cursed under his breath, practically rushing inside the cell, spurred by a freezing momentum of panic. If he squinted, he could make out Scott's vague form, splayed across the floor as if he were a replaceable doll that a child had thrown across the room in a fit of rage. He crouched, stooping to grab him like he'd grabbed Gem, except-
His skin was free from blood, but draped in thick spirals of corruption. The streams of red had withered across him: around his arms, his legs, his head, his mouth, all preventing him from moving. Like he was an animal about to be sacrificed.
He yanked the sword out of its holster, almost dropping it in his hurry, and found himself muttering receptive curses under his breath. The blade was designed for heavy duty combat, not at all for trimming away stands of demonic matter, but he cut them loose to the best of his ability. Which turned out to be not very efficient at all- how did people manage such large blades in small spaces? His mind continued to run with the line of questioning. Why was Scott restrained with corruption, but not Gem? Why was there corruption in Sausages basement in the first place?
He took back that question back as soon as he thought it. Sausage had been… unhealthily devoted to the demon for a while now, but Jimmy had never thought that it's demonic influence would go this far. Not to the extent of- of this-
He twitched. If Jimmy wasn't so focused, he probably would have dropped the sword entirely. Couldn't afford that right now. He continued, hand snatching for the pieces of corruption the moment they were sawed off and throwing them to the side. With every noise, every scitter, every rustle and tiny gasp from Gem, his heart seemed to pound louder.
Scott's eyes cracked open and Jimmy startled. It was an instinctive reaction, the creeping shadows and the crawling corruption and just about everything putting him on edge. He twitched again in the hold of the tendrils, and Jimmy burst out in a stream of hushed muttering.
"You're okay." He blurted out on instinct, tearing another piece away from his wrists. The hand flew up to grip his arm, fingers curled around it so tightly the knuckles turned white. "You've got to be okay. Alright? You've got to be-"
Gem's voice was strange and odd and quiet from where it drifted from behind him. "Jimmy. You might need to hurry up."
Oh. Okay. Yep. He was hurrying. He was definitely hurrying. The blade snagged one of the big pieces of corruption around his leg and tore through it like flesh. He chose to ignore it. He didn't want to think about how the moisture inside the tendrils seeped like blood. Because he was hurrying, and for obvious reasons, he was not going to waste time nauseating over the great clumps of red.
Scott's grip tightened around his arm, and Jimmy's rambled increased tenfold. "You're okay." He stammered hurriedly, pulling more of the corruption away. "Please be okay. Please be okay." He had better be okay, because if Gems healing potions weren't there they were fucked because there was no way he could carry both of them.
As soon as he sawed the matter off of his other worst, his hand flew up to where the corruption was wrapped around his mouth and curled, yanking the spiral of red away with brutal force. No sooner than a second had passed before he was coughing and sputtering violently. His nails dug into his skin so tightly that they cut into the flesh, printing sharp crescents into his arms.
He coughed, a dull resonance that shot through the air. His eyes stared at him with the intensity of a thousand moons, his fingers gripping him so hard that his arm went slightly numb. "Jimmy."
"Scott," he whispered back, because what else did you say to someone who had been kidnapped and thrown into a cell? He wanted to say a thousand things at once. But he couldn't say any of them, because they were in Sausages basement and Gem was almost half dead and they needed to leave, now-
He pulled the elf into his arms. His antlers pressed against his shoulder at an awkward angle, but he was so detached from his body he almost couldn't feel it. Everything seemed numb. What the fuck had happened? What had Sausage done?
Scott inhaled sharply, head tilting up to look at Jimmy's. The corruption had left a red mark across his face so sore that he could see it even in the darkness of the cell.
"I'm okay." He managed, voice weak and raspy. Jimmy didn't believe him, but real reassurances could wait. They didn't have the time for this. They didn't have the time for anything, in the end.
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